Various types of devices have been utilized for breaking, fragmenting or crushing bottles, jars and the like glass articles. These devices generally operate on the principle of a rotatable plate driven by a motor with the plate containing upwardly projecting vanes, ribs or other projections which impact the glass articles to break the same. This type of construction is also used in conventional garbage disposal units. However, there is one problem common to both the bottle crushers and the garbage disposal units, namely, that the impacting, crushing or breaking forces result in flying fragments typically having sharp, jagged edges which tend to be ejected upwardly and out of the crusher or disposal based upon the inertia imparted to them by the rotating plate.
Prior solutions to this problem include the use of a closure plate including a sheet of relatively stiff but resilient material such as rubber or urethane with the sheet having a plurality of equally spaced apart slits extending radially outwardly from the center to form a plurality of flexible tongue segments. Such a structure can be seen on any home garbage disposal unit, for example.
However, this type of closure plate is unsatisfactory because of the ease with which sharp particles may pass through the slits between the tongue segments especially as the closure plate becomes worn.
Thus the invention herein relates to an improved closure plate to close the open end of a feed chute for a bottle crusher or the like and to a method for fabricating such a closure plate.